Tag: Mondrian

Guido Van Rossum, who has been working with team working on Google App Engine, has released the open source version of Mondrian. Mondrian is the code review tool heavily used at Google by Google Engineers, Mondrian was developed by Guido as his first project at Google. Guido said:

My first project as a Google engineer was an internal web app for code review. According to Wikipedia, code review is “systematic examination (often as peer review) of computer source code intended to find and fix mistakes overlooked in the initial development phase, improving both the overall quality of software and the developers’ skills.” Not an exciting topic, perhaps, but the internal web app, which I code-named Mondrian after one of my favorite Dutch painters, was an overnight success among Google engineers (who evidently value software quality and skills development :-). I even gave a public presentation about it: you can watch the video on YouTube.

Guido always wanted to release Mondrian as open source, but due to its popularity amongst Google Engineers he couldn’t released it as Mondrian is heavily tied to Google internal development tools. According to Guido:

I’ve always hoped that we could release Mondrian as open source, but so far it hasn’t happened: due to its popularity inside Google, it became more and more tied to proprietary Google infrastructure like Bigtable, and it remained limited to Perforce, the commercial revision control system most used at Google.

But After joining Google App Engine Team Guido got a chance to write the clone of Mondrian which he named Rietveld and released as OpenSource. Rietveld is available at: codereview.appspot.com

According to Guido:

The Rietveld app serves several purposes at once: it is a demo of fairly large-scale use of the popular web framework Django with App Engine.